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INTRODUCTIONCHAPTER ONE. COMMON PRINCIPLES§1. Examples and definitions of rhythm.§2. Rhythm as a phenomenon of speech.CHAPTER TWO. PARTICULAR PRINCIPLES§1. Rhythm in English poetry§2. Rhythm in English prose.§3. Rhythm in English oral speech.CONCLUSIONBIBLIOGRAPHY

INTRODUCTION

Like any living language that has speakers English exists in two forms: spoken and written. This paper is dedicated to the research of the first form. The plot of this research is rhythm of the English language.The language itself is a system of signs for a communication. This means that there are two sides using this system: that who produces the information and that who receives it. They are the writer and the reader in written language, and they are the speaker and the listener in our case. Comparing two fields of the language we must find that oral speech is a lot more powerful in transmitting the information than the written one. The reason is that oral speech has more instruments to express a thought. First of all these are the abilities of the voice, and one of them is the rhythm.The word “rhythm” itself means an order of changing elements. Identical repeating elements are called phases. Rhythm of the language is an order of stresses. To clarify this definition we have to go to another subject of it i. e. stresses. “Stress” is emphasising syllables by the voice. It has aims for the both sides of communication. It is to help the speaker to produce the information without any unnecessary outlays (the Principle of Economy). And the listener accepts the information in its standard format (the Principle of Completeness). The rhythm of speech also satisfies the both sides.The phenomenon of rhythm is inevitable in the speech of a human being. No machine is no able to imitate human speech. The cause is that words never sound in the sensible speech as though it were in a mechanical row of lexical units. The often occurring mistake among people who study a foreign language is that they pronounce words in such a way as they sound in the dictionary transcription. But to speak the foreign language fluently one need build phrases according to the requirements of the language, and, first of all, to the requirements of the rhythm.The reason why we need rhythm in our speech has its antithesis which shows what we may get if we neglect rhythm. Unequal distances between the pauses make hard as the speaking as the listening. To research this thing it would be logical to choose the aim of this paper thus to explore the phenomenon of rhythm in the English language.Then to fulfill this aim we have to determine some scientific problems. Because of traditional scientific methods of induction and deduction we have a choice between the both. This case, as I suppose, demands movement from the common principles to the particular facts. This means our problems will be:1. To determine common principles of rhythm in the English language.2. To find out a certain quantity of particular thing enough to get a quite full idea of the rhythm in English.As the rhythm is a phenomenon of English oral speech it has been researched by plenty of scientist. The author did not manage to find some works on rhythm as a separate problem, but there was no difficulty to study a lot of works on English intonation.The main work that helped to complete the research was ‘Teaching English Intonation’ by S. Berlin and A. Veikhman. That work contains a chapter dedicated to rhythm in English. The authors described the phenomenon of the English rhythm as it should be taught to Russian students.Then the work ‘Syntactical Constructions of the English Oral Speech’ by E. Trofimova gave a lot of material to make the research. It contains a good theoretical base for clarifying the problem of rhythm. The book is not actually about the rhythm itself but it describes various rules and trends of the English spoken language, what lets us make our conclusion on our topic.The work ‘Intonation of English language’ by A. Volik and T. Mischenko is written in English. It has interesting tables that show phonetic part of the language.And sure it was impossible to complete the research without any source from the English Literature. To find examples and to illustrate theoretical points the author used a lot of works created by great British and American writers. There were quotations in the paper taken as from prosaic works as from poetic ones. The choice in favour of certain writers was because of their popularity, easy way to get their texts and being generally recognised as the author of the high-quality English language.The third sort of sources that were used to write this paper are audio-examples of English speech. These are: English movies, tapes and living English speech. There were a lot of various types of speakers. Having a great choice the author preferred people who had been born and grown in the Great Britain and the United States of America. Those were the actors who played those movies, people whose voices were used in training-tapes and some foreigners from those countries who happened occasionally to be met in Russia.The reader may find a sort of asymmetry in the scheme when the second chapter contains two parts about written language and only one part about spoken language but this is for more comfortable reading. It has no practical problems to study and to use it.About the references. There is a bibliography in the end of the paper. If there is a reference in the text one can find the full title of the source in the bibliography. The references in the bottom of pages have only parts of the titles enough to go to the bibliography.

CHAPTER ONECOMMON PRINCIPLES

§1. Examples and definitions of rhythm.‘The English take a dozen of simple words, chew them, swallow them and then spit them out – that is what they call the English language.’ This is a famous sentence from Heinrich Heine . He was saying a joke of course, but there is a truth in this that English has quite fast tempo and sometimes it’s hard to separate the sounds.The English language has internal regularities to sound elegant and noble. The sense of rhythm is growing through the whole life-time in the native speaker. The word “rhythm” itself means a sort of order. The ordered ones may be stresses, figures of intonation, pauses and so on so forth. As far as English is an Indo-European language (or Indo-German, on Grimms Bros.) it has a lot of common with Latin and Greek, which grammars were parental for the new European languages. English has disyllabic and trisyllabic orders of stresses like Latin and Greek do. Going on with the rhythm of stresses we must systemise possible variants. There are two disyllabic metres in English which are trochee and iamb.Here is an example of trochee‘One, two, three, four, five, six, seven,Eight, nine, ten and then eleven...’ (a childish game-verse).and that of iamb:‘Of love and home and that sweet timeWhen last I heard their soothing chime!’ (T.Moore)There are three trisyllabyc metres also which are dactyl, amphibrach and anapaest.Let’s take instances of each of them:Dactyl.......